CONJUROR ON THE RIVER KWAI: How Britain's oldest magician performed his greatest trick - surviving as a Japanese PoW

CAPTIVITY, SLAVERY AND SURVIVAL AS A FAR EAST POW BY PETER FYANS (Pen & Sword £19.99)

Courage: Fergus Anckorn worked on the Burma Railroad, immortalised in Bridge On The River Kwai

Not many soldiers who fought throughout World War II are still alive. But one group in particular have almost gone now - the men who fought in the Pacific and were captured by the Japanese.

So to have a brand-new memoir from a man who endured the atrocities of the infamous Burma ‘Death Railway’ feels almost like an illusion - rather like the conjuring tricks which, as this astonishing book shows, diverted the Japanese and helped keep Fergus Anckorn alive.

Left for dead in a storm drain in Singapore, one of few survivors of a hospital massacre in which hundreds died, his sheer existence is a miracle. Yet here he is - still sturdy, bright-eyed and cracking jokes at 93, his story made public only because he happened to sit at dinner next to a writer, Peter Fyans, who realised what a tale Anckorn had to tell.

Yes, Fergus was lucky - but he also made his luck. He was shrewd, wiry, determined and quick-witted, all qualities which he would have to call upon.

Yet what saved him was his sleight of hand. As a boy, growing up, carefree, in a close-knit family in Kent, he endlessly practised conjuring tricks until, at 18, he was elected the youngest member of the Magic Circle (He is the oldest practising member today).

Survivor: Fergus Anckorn in uniform

Fergus married his sweetheart Lucille in late 1941. Shortly afterwards, his artillery regiment embarked on a troopship.

Scarcely had Fergus’s party landed in Singapore when they were dive-bombed by the Japanese. With no time to reach shelter, Fergus plunged into the dock, unaware that if a bomb hit the water, the blast wave would have killed him.

He was lucky, but when he emerged it was to find five of his companions blown to pieces.

This was Fergus’s first introduction to the war. And worse was to come. Making his way back from the supply tent with a tin of beetroot for his mates on the front line, Anckorn was ordered to take with him a jammed shell, live and primed.

Minutes later, a bomb landed less than 10ft away. The jammed shell exploded, and so did the beetroot - his sickened comrades thought Fergus had been turned to mush. He was eventually found lying in a ditch, so badly wounded that his dog-tags had already been taken off and handed in by a fellow soldier.

In hospital, dipping in and out of consciousness, he pleaded for his hand to be saved from amputation, gaining help from a medical orderly who recognised him as the conjuror he had seen back in England.

It was now in this hospital, the Alexandra Military Hospital, Singapore, that one of the war’s most horrific crimes took place.

Japanese soldiers in full battle-gear overran the building, shooting and bayoneting patients and doctors, even those in the operating theatre.

Half-conscious, Fergus heard gunfire and heavy footsteps, and then a curious thudding noise - the sound of the wounded being bayoneted in their beds. Already covered in blood after a haemorrhage, Fergus buried his head under his pillow, muttered to himself, ‘Poor Mum’, and waited to die.

How did he survive? Probably the Japanese, seeing the blood and his face covered like a corpse, thought him dead already, and passed by.

His contempt for the high command responsible for the death-trap that was Singapore shines through the intervening years.

His survival in Changi prison-camp with a crippled leg and a smashed right arm (saved by introducing maggots to devour the gangrene) is yet another miracle. The cartoonist Ronald Searle, who died last week, was another Changi inmate and made drawings for him.

In early 1942, Fergus was sent north, one of thousands of British prisoners trucked in to work on the infamous Burma Railroad, built to create a supply route between Burma and Thailand.

The track tunnelled through dense jungle, over mountains and precipices, straddling rivers in spate. Working in monsoon conditions and fed starvation diets, the Allied soldiers died like flies, plagued by malaria, tropical ulcers, cholera and dysentery. Fergus was getting weaker: he was only saved when, ordered to carry scalding creosote up a 100ft viaduct, he found he couldn’t move, even when the shrieking guard emptied the creosote over his back.

Sleight of hand: Conjuring helped Fergus survive the horrors of the Japanese POW camps

Fergus expected a death sentence: instead, he was taken by boat downriver to a hospital camp. The Japanese, who scorned weakness, accepted that physical injuries like his burns needed to be repaired.

His wounds began to heal and his renewed strength enabled him to do some simple magic - making handkerchiefs and playing cards vanish and reappear. Word reached Camp Commandant Osato, a ruthless bully who shot dogs and ordered beatings for fun.

He turned out to have an insatiable appetite for magic, demanding over and over again to see how Fergus’s tricks worked.

While prisoners around him continued to die of exhaustion and disease, Fergus could get more food and longer rest-breaks for his friends by distracting the guards. In the eyes of the Japanese, he became almost a human.

With the backing of officers, Fergus was now putting on ‘concert parties’ - his magic acts joined by comedians, singers and even musicians of a sort: the double bass was made out of two tea chests, its strings the innards of a cow.

The railroad had been completed, at the expense of thousands of lives and too late to help Japan’s war aims.

The surviving prisoners were transported deep into Thailand - and then came Hiroshima. Fergus told his biographer that his newly-won freedom was almost too much to bear. ‘I almost couldn’t take the strain of it. I had taught myself never to think of tomorrow.”

Had the enemy set foot on the Japanese mainland, the Japanese High Command had orders to liquidate every single prisoner-of-war. Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved them.

Fergus Anckorn took a slow boat home. He was 27 and, like his fellows, was condemned to spend years rebuilding his life in a Britain which had little time for heroes, and which wanted to forget forever the disaster that had been Singapore.

Among the memoirs of these terrible events, this one must rank highly for its courage, modesty and cheerfulness. ‘Keep smiling,’ is Anckorn’s constant advice.